Essay on Brendan Behan

Essay on Brendan Behan This essay looks at three of Brendan Behans main works which most critics agree are his best. These three main works are; The Quare Fellow (1954), The Hostage (1958) and Borstal Boy (1958).The essay begins with a brief biography of Behans life and reveals some of the reasons how his younger years influenced his later works. The essay also gives a brief synopsis of these three works and explores some of the re-occurring themes within these works. It finally examines some of the ways that he has shaped and influenced the Irish national identity. Brendan Behan was born in Dublin on 9 February 1923 into an educated Dublin working class family. He grew up in Dublins north inner city near Mountjoy Square. Both his parents had a big influence on the literature that he would later come to write. Behans father, Stephen, had been active in the Irish War of Independence; his mother Kathleen remained politically active for all life and his uncle Peadar Kearney composed the Irish national anthem The Soldiers Song(Amhrà ¡n na bhFiann). When Brendan was a child his father would often read classic literature to the children at bedtime and his mother would take them on walks around the city pointing out different houses of noted Irish literary figures, while also showing them where the citys revolutionaries had been born or executed.   When Brendan was a child he would read anything he could find and even at the age of six the head nun in his primary school had informed his mother Kathleen that she was rearing a genius (O Connor, 1 970 p.20). Despite his obvious ability at school he decided at the age of 14 to leave and follow his fathers trade as a painter. Soon after leaving school Brendan joined Fianna Éireann, the youth organisation of the IRA. In 1939, at the age of 16, he went on a bombing mission to England but he was arrested and found to be in possession of explosives. He was sentenced to three years in a borstal institution in England but returned to Ireland in 1941. The following year he was imprisoned in Ireland and released as part of a general amnesty in 1946. He wrote about these years in his autobiography novel Borstal Boy. Upon his release he moved between Dublin, Kerry and Connemara, and spent some time in Paris, where he wrote in both Irish and English. Behan produced his first play The Quare Fellow in 1954 in Dublin. The following year he married Beatrice Ffrench-Salkeld. In 1958 Behan wrote his second play An Giall which was written in the Irish language and performed in the Dublin. That same year The Hostage, which was Behans English language version of An Giall, met with great international success following Jo an Littlewoods production of it in London. Also in 1958 Borstal Boy was published and it became an immediate best seller. Behans international success, along with the financial rewards, brought about an increase in his drinking problems. After years of heavy drinking he had developed diabetes and it was due to this that he died, aged 41, on 20 March 1964 (OConnor, 1970). This part of the essay shall examine, and give a brief synopsis of, Behans three main works; The Quare Fellow (1954), The Hostage (1958) and Borstal Boy (1958). His first play The Quare Fellow is set in a Dublin prison on the eve of the execution of the quare fellow, a colloquial term for someone on death sentence. One of the condemned prisoners, who has murdered his wife, has been recently pardoned; while the other prisoner, the quare fellow who has murdered his brother, has not. Although the quare fellow is the centrepiece of the play, it is not about him and he never appears or utters any words. There is no question of his guilt and he is not a likeable figure. The only sympathy for him is that he is going to be executed the following day. The play does not explore the effect of the execution on the quare fellow but looks at the effect on the prisoners, wardens and the hangman himself. The hero in the play is Warden Regan who is a devoted Catholic while also being a humanist. Alth ough he accepts the system of the Church and Society, the humanity in him can see the hypocrisy in this system. The play ends the following morning with the quare fellow being executed. The play is based on Behans own experiences in Mountjoy prison, and it questions the right of any society to inflict or carry out the barbarous act of capital punishment which was still then in use in Ireland. It also attacks some of the false piety in attitudes in 1950s Ireland to sex, politics and religion (Russell,) The second play Behan wrote was An Gaill which was later translated into English and called The Hostage (1958). The play is set in Dublin guesthouse-cum-brothel during the late 1950s. It portrays the capturing and detention of a young Cockney British soldier by the IRA in response to the planned execution, by the British, of an IRA volunteer in Belfast. The 19 year old British soldier has been kidnapped as he is leaving an Armagh Dance Hall. The IRA declares that it will shoot the hostage Leslie Williams, if their Belfast Boy is executed at Belfast Gaol the following morning. Private Williams is imprisoned in a lower class Dublin guesthouse-cum-brothel owned by a fanatical Gael. During the course of the play Leslie falls in love with the young Irish convent girl, Theresa, and she also falls for him. They have both grown up in similar backgrounds, both are orphans who now find themselves in a city that they are foreign to, and neither of them cares much for any wars or battles that ha ve been fought between Britain and Ireland in the past or the present. The play is made up of a variety of characters such as fallen rebel heroes, homosexual navvies, pimps and whores, convent girls and deteriorating civil servants who are loyal to the nationalist cause. Private Williams is entertained by them with jigs and reels, rock n roll dancing, rebel songs and tales about Irelands glorious past, and all the time the IRA guards await for news from Belfast.It is eventually only by accident that he discovers that he is the hostage and will be executed if the IRA volunteer in Belfast is hung. Towards the end of the play the manager of the place understands the futility of continuing the Old fight but feels powerless to intervene. At the end of the play the news arrives that the IRA volunteer has been hanged and in the ensuing armed Gardaà ­ raid on the brothel the hostage is accidently shot and killed. At the finale of the English version of the play the corpse of the dead hosta ge rises up and sings The bells of hell/ Go ting-a-ling-a-ling. Also in 1958 Behan released his autobiographical novel Borstal Boy. The book is based on the three years that he spent in Hollesley Bay Borstal in Suffolk, England, after being caught with explosives in Liverpool. It is a vivid memoir of the years that being spent there. Story depicts a young Behan, full of Republican fervour and idealism, softening his radicalism and warming to his fellow British inmates and the wardens known as screws. The story is not a venomous attack on Britain but instead it portrays Behans move away from radicalism and violence. The dialogue in the book captures the lively interactions amongst the Borstal inmates along with all their various distinctive accents from around the British Isles. As the story develops Behan skilfully demonstrates that due to their working class, whether they are Irish Catholic or English Protestant, they share a lot more in common than they had realised. Behan realises that any supposed barriers of religion and ethnicity are just s uperficial and are beliefs that have been imposed on him by an anxious middle class. Ultimately he emerges as a young man who is realistic and recognises the truth that violence, especially political violence, is futile. The image at end of the novel is of a young working class man, who has been stunted by crime and prison, coming right and growing into being an independent thinker, writer and playwright (Kearney, 1970). In the three works of Behans that have been looked at in this essay there are a number of re-occurring themes to be found within them. The stories are written from a working class perspective with socialist leanings. In these works Behan writes in his own voice and this is most obvious in the language used in the Borstal Boy. In this book Behan uses an engaging style of writing and incorporates the use of phonetic spelling in an interesting and creative way for an authentic effect. The narrative flow is sometimes condensed and other times heavily unhurried. All these works are based around some form of imprisonment and they are critical of both church and state, religion and the power of authority. In the Quare Fellow we see Warden Regan questioning his society and battling with his conscience over the execution of even a guilty man. The theme of execution is also present in The Hostage with both Private Williams and the IRA volunteer awaiting possible execution. In The Hostage the p rincipal theme is of a young innocents being set against those with political motivations and ambitions. The Hostage questions the futility of patriotic fervour and political violence (Jeffs,1966)   and this theme is also found in the Borstal Boy which was based on Behans own experiences. Both The Hostage and Borstal Boy examining the Anglo-Irish relationship exploring the fact that there is very little difference between working class Irish Catholics or working class English Protestants. In Behans two plays he somewhat questions the Irish identity itself and the new young Irish Free State. The plays look at this new Free State and exposes that it is carrying on the same practices of their old governing colonial power. For a Republican like Behan it must have seemed brutally ironic that the official hangman for the Irish Free State was often an imported Englishman (Kiberd, 1989, p.336). In The Quare Fellow, Behan has the lags Dunlavin put it as the Free State didnt change anything more than the badges in the warders caps. The same olds class prejudices, which were imported from England, are still present and have not been rejected in the new Irish state. The Dublin Gaeilgeoir in the play represents this lack of change (Kiberd, 1989). John Brannigan, the author of the Behan biography Brendan Behan, Cultural Nationalism and the Revisionist Writer, questions some of the stereotypes that hang around the figure of Behan. He situates Behan amidst a generation of Irish writers in the mid-20th century Ireland having to deal with the dull, even gloomy aftermath of the previous, more heroic, age of Irish 20th century history. The promise of the earlier decades of the 20th century was not delivered and their age was of disappointment and anti-climax (Brannigan, 2002). Unfortunately, the success that Behan received for his writing only increased his drinking problem and he played into the drunken Irishman caricature. After translating his work An Gaill into English he allowed Joan Littlewoods production of The Hostage to compromise and dilute the realism of the original Irish version by giving it interludes of music-hall singing and dancing (OConnor, 1970). At the end of The Hostage, when it finishes with the dead British soldiers corpse rising up and singing The bells of hell/ Go ting-a-ling-a-ling, we are left wondering not only about Behans politics but also about his literary integrity. After the Borstal Boy, Behan was unable to produce another classic. His later books like Brendan Behans Island and Brendan Behans New York could not be compared to his former works. Whatever criticism there may be of Behans later works, it does not take away from what he has contributed to imagination of the Irish national identity. His work has been a significant influence to many writers and he has made his way into many Irish and international songs. The Auld Triangle, which is Behans prisoner song from The Quare Fellow, has become something of an Irish folk standard and has been recorded on numerous occasions by groups such as The Dubliners and also The Pogues. Both of his plays, as well as the Borstal Boy which was first made into a play in 1967, have still remained popular with Irish audiences (Murphy, 2014) and Borstal Boy was also made into a film in 2000. Word Count: 2100 Bibliography Brannigan, J., (2002) Brendan Behan, Cultural Nationalism and the Revisionist Writer. Dublin, Four Courts Press. Jeffs, R., (1966) Brendan Behan: Man and Showman. London, Hutchinson Co. Kearney, C.,(1976) Borstal Boy: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Prisoner, Ariel. VII (April, 1976), pp. 47-62. Kiberd, D., (1989) Irish literature and of Irish history. In: Foster, R.F., (1989) (ed.) The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Murphy, C., (2014) Brendan Behan the borstal boy, boozer and bomb-maker, Irish Independent, 07 September. OConnor, U., (1970) Brendan Behan. London, Granada Publishing Ltd. Russell, R.R., (2002) Brendan Behans Lament for Gaelic Ireland: The Quare Fellow. New Hibernia Review. 6 (1): pp. 73-93

Brothels and Convents in Renaissance and Measure for Measure Essay

In this investigation I will focus mostly on the regulation of both convents and brothels in the time period of Shakespeare and the early Renaissance. Ruth Mazo Karras’ â€Å"The Regulation of Brothels in Later Medieval England,† focuses exactly on this topic throughout England and other European countries during the Renaissance. In regards to the convents I will be looking closely at an article entitled â€Å"Subjects on the World’s Stage: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,† written by David G. Allen and Robert A. White. The regulations of brothels in the Renaissance were regarded heavily. Karras says that women within these brothels were basically regarded as evil and as sinners yet they remained occupying the position of prostitution solely because of the sexual appetite of men; these brothels were considered â€Å"†¦a necessary evil† (Karras). The first parallel between women of convents and stews I came to find was that of the aspect of being forbidden from society in a sense. Women of convents were completely shut off from the public, no insiders could leave and no outsiders could come in (Allen). The only difference in the secrecy of these two places was the fact that the brothels were attended by men. Karras also states that the women of brothels were not given any rights that regular women had, â€Å"In some places, she was not allowed to reject any customer, indeed could not be raped because she was considered to belong to all men and thus had no right to withhold consent† (Karras). These two aspects of women’s lives in this time period play a major part in the drama Measure for Measure, and especially set up the scene in the opening act of the play. When Claudio sends for his sister, Isabel, to help him get out of jail, in which he was sentenced to death for having premarital (by the eyes of the church) sex with Juliet, Isabel leaves the convent in which she was about to take her vows in order to save her brother. Thus, we have an almost-nun and sinful intercourse immediately in Act 1, both directly related to the idea of convents and brothels and the women within these places. In this case, however, Juliet is not a prostitute but in the eyes of Angelo and the law is regarded as one because of her and Claudio’s unofficial and insufficient marriage.

The Effects of Technology on Modern Life

Television has truly changed the lives of most people in Britain. Nearly all British households have at least one colour television. The amount of time people spend each day watching TV is increasingly significantly every year. In the first three months of 2010 British viewers watched a record of more than four hours of TV a day on average. Some children have become addicted to watching TV and watch it all day when not in school. Referring to Passage B, children will have watched about 25,000 hours of TV by the age of 18. I believe parents need to be stricter with their children and get them involved with sports and clubs to prevent them from watching too much TV or playing games indoors. A lot of the programs on TV today including Big Brother, The only way is Essex, etc, are reality programmes that are meaningless to our everyday lives. People will do anything to get on TV nowadays! Technology is getting more advanced each day and has taken over our lives. From small fuzzy TV’s with few channels to plasma screen TV’s with hundreds, from writing letters to instantly texting someone on a touch screen phone. These are all amazing advances in technology and have changed people’s lives. Although as it says in Passage B, TV violence contributes to real violence and it influences people into bad language, sex and pain. The Internet has also changed many people lives. In Passage A, it mentions a new technology called VOIP – Voice Over Internet Protocol, so now people can phone there friends, wherever they are, for as long as you want, for absolutely free. I think this is good and bad because all though it is fast and doesn’t cost, people may then spend to much time on their phone, knowing there are no restrictions. There are also many social network sites where you can chat to friends instantly and share personal information. People as young as 10 have an account on these social network sites, which can be highly dangerous. There are pedophiles on these sites that can easily manipulate young kids. The sites try to stop these things from happening but with so many people online, it’s almost impossible to stop them all. Facebook is one of the biggest online social networking sites with over 850million users and over 3000 employees. It is one of the fastest ways to communicate with friends and share personal information. Facebook is the fastest growing social networking site and was created in 2004. You must be 13 or older to have an account on Facebook but there 7.5 million children under 13 with accounts and 5 million under 10, violating the site’s terms of service. Technology is a massive thing in our everyday lives and we use it for almost everything. People can accomplished so many things using technology and it helped companies become more known, millions of people can watch the same thing at once, but its not just TV and Internet. With new technology we can fly jumbo jets around the world, visiting 100’s of different countries each day. Technology has changed massively within the last 20 years, which is very good, but could also be very bad. We need to control how we use technology, especially watching TV and the internet, because it is wasting our lives when they are many things to do and things t accomplish. This is what we have come to.

The Threat Of Boko Haram Essay - 1595 Words

Independent from British ruling since 1960, Nigeria today still suffers from ethnical and religious divisions as well as unequal distribution of power and resources among its regions. A high degree of violence and insecurity has shaped Nigeria’s political framework since colonial times. The region is characterized by systematic human under-development and socio-political decay. By draining resources from development, terrorism creates an additional burden on the society and interferes with development opportunities. According to Aghedo Osumah (2012) the term national security has been boarded to encompass both state and human security. While state security is analogous to the dominant notion of national security, human security, on the other hand, emphasizes the preservation of the well-being of persons, including the protection of their socioeconomic, political and environmental rights. The notion of security is reorganized as a social construct, imbued with human faces (p.855). 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